The second event in the Indo-Persian Musical Confluence series features a panel that considers Persian poetry in Indian Music. The panel is followed by a performance by The Kusro Circle.

Panelists: Suresh Chandvankar (Society of Indian Record Collectors, Mumbai); Anoushka Deb (University of Delhi); Syed Yaser Ali (Independent Scholar); Pushpita Mitra (JNU-India)

Chair and Discussant: Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak

Performance - Indian Dance Inspired by Persian Poetry: The Khusro Circle, Pallabi Chakravorty (Swarthmore College)

Project Leader: Mohsen Mohammadi

About the symposium: The sitar and setar are the foremost classical instruments of India and Iran. They are seen by most people as being distinct instruments from different countries and traditions. However, they share a common ancestry, and their name is in fact the same word (Persian, سه­تار). It was transliterated into English in slightly different ways during colonial times. As we scratch just beneath the deceptive surface of Indian and Iranian music, we find the rich confluence that is the Indo-Persian world, a realm of connected histories and creativity, and a space to imagine new ones.

Indo-Persian studies emerged in the eighteenth century in the context of European colonialism and has come to deal with a large area in Asia which Marshall Hudgson called the Persianate world (Hudgson 1974). Indo-Persian cultural exchange dates back to antiquity. In ancient Persia, legend has it that by the request of Bahram V (r.420–438), twelve thousand musicians were sent from India to Iran, and there are still tribes of musicians in southwest Iran that believe they immigrated from India. However, it was when Mahmud of Ghazni (r.999-1030) extended his territories to India, introducing Persian language and Islam to the Indian subcontinent, that a sustained period of rich cultural exchange began. The Indo-Persian territory at its zenith extended to China, Eastern Europe, and Northern Africa. Cultural syncretism developed in these vast areas not just through the official language and religion of the courts – Persian and Islam – but through trade, wandering Sufis, Persian poetry, scholars, and musicians, engendering deep and long-lasting connections.

In North India, this Indo-Persian confluence is evident in genres such as khyal and tarana, and in the iconic classical instruments, the sitar and sarod. Raga was developed in new ways through the connection of music, astrology and Unani medicine in Mughal India (Brown 2010), and present-day tala is a hybrid of accentual and syllabic forms, likely emanating from the Indo-Persian confluence (Clayton 2007). The influence of Persian language, poetry and scholarship in Indian Sufism is immense, with, for example, many Persian texts included in the repertoire of qawwali (Qureshi 1986). It is also apparent in shared poetic conventions which extend beyond classical forms and into vernacular genres, with imagery, metaphors, and phrases shared between Persian and Indic songs. The Indo-Persian connection is manifested in the urban and classical music of Afghanistan, and musical cultures in various regions such as Baluchistan and Kashmir. It is also important to note that having Persian as the common language for writing and communication, scholars in Iran/Central Asia and India were able to read Persian books on the two major traditions of Indian and Persian music. Through the original writings on Persian music by immigrant scholars in India such as Seyf-Jām of Herat, Qāsim ibn Dust-Ali of Bukhara, and Hossein Zahiri from Isfahan, Indian scholars were able to have direct encounters with Persian music. Indian music was also able to make an impact back on music in Iran by such routes. For example, the symbolic mode derivation in Persian texts, in which each of the six āvāz generated two maqams, seems to be an influence of the Indian music system of six ragas which each had five raginis.

Indo-Persian musical connections remained active into the early-to-mid twentieth century, when Iranian musicians travelled to India and produced records. The Parsi community – Persian Zoroastrians who had immigrated to India – maintained connections with Iran, and the first Persian talkie movie, Dokhtar-e Lor, was produced in India by the Zoroastrian community. In Afghanistan, Ustad Sarahang (1924–1983) studied music with Ashiq Ali Khan of India’s Patiala gharana and became a legendary Afghan musician. In Iran, Indian musicians were invited by individual patrons up till before the 1979 revolution, and as a part of the cosmopolitan Shiraz Festival.

Historically, rulers patronized musicians and artists from across this region and syncretism flourished. However, the era of nationalism ushered in a quite different perspective, one focused on purity of tradition and a concern with what is ‘native’ to a place. While the Indo-Persian confluence has given birth to and enriched north Indian art music, this history is downplayed in India, and mythical origins in India’s ancient, pre-Islamic past are emphasized instead. In Iran, the influence of Indo-Persian cultural exchange on music is admittedly less than in India, but it has been little explored. New borders have divided India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Iran into highly separate zones, obscuring the wealth of connections of the past. Nevertheless, in recent decades, new relationships between musicians have emerged in the form of ‘world music’ and fusion projects. Most notably, two renowned musicians from Iran and India, Kayhan Kalhor and Shujaat Hussein Khan, initiated a collaboration, Ghazal, that lasted for two decades and resulted in a series of tours and albums over the past twenty years. In India, the emergence of Sufi music as a craze amongst upper middle-class urbanites has also framed these traditions in new ways (Manuel 2008).

Although the rich musical connections between South, West, and Central Asia has been partially obscured, a critical mass of scholarly attention to this history had emerged by the beginning of this millennium. Regula Qureshi’s book on qawwali was a pioneering study of the quintessentially Indo-Persian Sufi music of India and Pakistan (1986). Najma Perveen Ahmad (1984), Allyn Miner (1993), Shahab Sarmadee (e.g. 2003), and Madhu Trivedi (2012) have all undertaken groundbreaking scholarship on Indian music from Persian texts, Bonnie Wade had an ethnomusicological study of musical culture in Mughal India (1998), and Katherine Brown/Schofield’s works on Mughal India have been particularly transformative of our understanding of the Indo-Persian history of Hindustani music (e.g. 2010). Dilorom Karomat (2006) and Mohsen Mohammadi (2006) have published on musical connections between India and Iran/Central Asia, and John Baily (1988) and Assadullah Shour (2011) have produced important works on the Indo-Persian synergy of music in Afghanistan. The growing prominence of the topic was marked in India in 2005 when the ITC Sangeet Research Academy in India, in collaboration with several other institutions including UNESCU’s International Council for Traditional Music and the University of Amsterdam, held an international symposium in Mumbai titled ‘India-Iran: Confluence of Musical Cultures’. Proceedings of this conference were published in a special issue of the Journal of the Indian Musicological Society (V 36/37, 2005-2006).

This program of events aims to give a new prominence to the myriad dimensions of Indo-Persian musical exchange, and to examine its contemporary legacy in countries across this region. It seeks to bring together scholars from various disciplines working on musical cultures of India, Central Asia, and Iran, and to enhance collaborations and comparative research. It also aims to promote new musical relationships and associations.

Symposium Sponsors: UCLA Mohindar Brar Sambhi Chair of Indian Music, UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology, UCLA Center for Musical Humanities (Robert U. Nelson Fund),  UCLA Jahangir and Eleanor Amuzegar Chair in Iranian Studies, UCLA Iranian Studies Program, UCLA Center for India and South Asia, The UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies

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